Polling Millennials

Rand Paul recently asked,“have you ever met a college student that has answered a presidential poll?” Great question. No Rand, I have never met a college student that has. The more I thought about this question, the more time I spent wondering why.

Cliff Zukin, in a New York Times opinion piece, explained that due to the FCC’s interpretation of the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act, pollsters are prohibited from calling cell phones through automatic dialers, in which calls are passed to live interviewers only after a person picks up. (a great interpretation by the way).

Zukin mentioned that to complete a 1,000-person survey, it’s not unusual to have to dial more than 20,000 random numbers, and that manually dialing cell phones takes a great deal of paid staff and time.

Basically, it’s too expensive to poll cell phone-strapped millennials. Maybe this is the market opportunity that Brigade (www.brigade.com) is going after. Maybe not. Either way, our Republican leadership can learn from Rand Paul’s question because it provokes a response to a truly provocative question.